I seriously doubt that anyone in the Obama administration or the congress is going to seriously consider abolishing the CIA, but I think John Judis is correct to say that the idea should probably get more consideration:

The question that Congress might ponder, but won’t, is whether the structure of our foreign policy apparatus – the power and responsibility vested in a secret branch of government — invites abuse. That was the position of the late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan who argued for abolishing the CIA. He didn’t want to eliminate intelligence, but he wanted to return it to the purview of the State Department, while giving the armed forces the responsibility for overseas intervention.

I’m not saying I favor this, but it’s certainly worth discussing. One need only consider George Tenet’s reign as CIA chief. Tenet came in with a reform portfolio; and he initially did well as a manager; but by the time he had been forced out of office, the CIA itself had committed more war crimes, and bollixed more critical intelligence inquiries than ever before. Was that because Tenet was deeply incompetent? Or was there something about the agency’s structure in government that invited presidents to twist it for their own sordid political ends? Could the armed services have as easily complied with these torture memos? I think not.

The CIA, as currently constituted, has basically two responsibilities—intelligence analysis and covert operations. But analysis is already being done at the State Department, and seemingly done better, so one could simply beef up the resources involved in the State Department. The military, meanwhile, already has the capability to do some covert operations and there’s a general consensus in favor of shifting resources out of heavy weapons platforms and toward special operations.

The picture of the torture situation that’s emerging counts, I think, as a strong point in favor of the Moynihan position. It’s not just that CIA personnel were involved in doing something bad, it’s that the specific institutional structure of the government really does seem to have played a role. After all, why were CIA personnel involved in this at all? Pre-Bush, the CIA didn’t have any interrogators. The FBI had interrogators, and the military had interrogators, but the CIA didn’t. But responsibility for interrogations wound up gravitating toward the CIA not because the CIA had relevant expertise but precisely because the CIA has an institutional history and track record of law-breaking and war crimes.

Back in January 2008, The New York Times’ David Leonhardt became the first prominent writer I’ve seen to try to define Barack Obama’s economic outlook primarily in terms of behavioral economics. Since that article came out, there have been a few other stabs in that genre, and now Frank Foer and Noam Scheiber have given us the most comprehensive essay I’ve seen along these lines. It’s very much worth reading. But let me say that while I think this insight is basically true, I think there are some real limits to how much light it really sheds.

But to review the basic facts:

• Obama was a professor at the University of Chicago law school, hotbed of law and economics and so forth.
• Obama’s been close to Cass Sunstein, author of a book on how to apply behavioral economics to policy issues, for a long time and has given Sunstein an obscure-but-power office in his administration.
• OMB Director Peter Orszag likes to talk about how we need more Psychology 101 and less Economics 101 in our policymaking.
• The administration has been eager to make it known that people have read Animal Spirits, an attempt to apply behavioral economics to macroeconomic issues.

There’s some more and that’s the core of the case. And I think it’s a good case.

But at the end of the day, I think this would be much more significant if the United States had a very different policy status quo. In a European country that already has high taxes and a generous welfare state, then tweaking the welfare state is about what you would expect a new center-left government to do, so specific ideas about how to do the tweaking would be the highlight of the agenda. But the United States has relatively low taxes and a relatively threadbare welfare state. Consequently, the big issue of the day just continues to be the fairly crude question of whether the government should do more to provide certain kinds of basic services or shouldn’t it.

I wanted to take a moment to recommend a new book by Chris Preble, the top foreign policy guy at Cato, called The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. The book’s got a good explanatory subtitle, but to briefly sketch the thesis Preble argues that our over-large military establishment isn’t just a waste of money, but actually harmful to our security. The reason is that it spawns a self-justifying ideology about the appropriate American role in the world that leads us to repeated foreign policy blunders. If we had much less military capacity, we would have a much narrower definition of the strategic purpose of our military—to defend the country against threats—and would find that we were happy with that equilibrium. But the large military spawns a grandiose strategic concept that winds up writing checks that even a gigantic military can’t cash.

I think this analysis is dead on. My prescription would not be quite as radical as Preble’s. I think the main flaw with it is that he doesn’t take his own analysis seriously enough—for a variety of reasons, it’s just not going to be the case that America suddenly decides to abandon its aspirations to play a global leadership role. Under the circumstances, I think it’s important to try to think of plausible ways for us to play that role in a constructive way rather than a self-defeating and destructive one, rather than just kind of saying from the sidelines that we should abandon the whole thing. That said, my own views are sufficiently far outside the mainstream that I hardly see any point in quibbling with people who would exercise even more military restraint than I would.

The video of a recent event that Preble did with my colleague Larry Corb and The American Conservative‘s Scott McConnell is also worth watching. It shows that the coalition of people calling for a serious rethink of American strategy and defense spending priorities—a group in which I would include myself—is as ideologically diverse as we are ineffective in actually getting our way. Barack Obama’s taken a lot of good steps so far, but realistically the gap between the change we need and the change we’re going to get remains pretty big.